MaddAddam

The Story of Zeb and Fuck

You don’t need to tell them a story every time. Come with me, instead. You can skip a night.

I already skipped one night. I can’t disappoint them too much. They might leave here and go back to the beach, and then they’d be easy to attack. Those Painballers would … I’d never forgive myself if …

Okay. But make it short?

I’m not sure that’s possible. They ask a lot of questions.

Tell them to piss off.

They wouldn’t understand that. They think piss is a good thing. Like fuck — they think there’s an invisible entity called Fuck. A helper of Crake’s in time of need. And of Jimmy’s, because they heard him saying Oh fuck.

I’m with them. Fuck! An invisible entity! A helper in time of need! Dead right!

They want to hear a story about him. About him and you, actually. The two of you, having boyish adventures. You’re both stars at the moment. They’ve been pestering me about it, that story.

Can I listen in?

No. You’d laugh.

See this mouth? Virtual duct tape! If I had some Krazy Glue, I could … Hey, I could glue my mouth to your …

Don’t be so warped.

Life is warped. I’m just in synch.

Thank you for the fish.

See, I am wearing the red hat, and I have listened to the round shiny thing I wear on my arm.

Tonight I will tell you the story of Zeb and Fuck. As you have asked me to do.

Once Zeb had left his home, where his father and his mother were not kind to him, he wandered around in the chaos. He did not know where to go next, and he did not know where his brother, Adam, was, who was his only friend and helper.

Yes, Fuck was his friend and helper too, but he could not be seen.

No, that is not an animal over there in the dark behind the shrub. That is Zeb. He is not laughing, he is coughing.

So, Zeb’s brother, Adam, was his only friend and helper that he could see and touch. Was Adam lost? Had he been stolen away? Zeb did not know, and that made him feel sad.

But Fuck kept him company and gave him advice. Fuck lived in the air and flew around like a bird, which was how he could be with Zeb one minute, and then with Crake, and then also with Snowman-the-Jimmy. He could be in many places at once. If you were in trouble and you called to him — Oh Fuck! — he would always be there, just when you needed him. And as soon as you said his name, you would feel better.

Yes, Zeb does have a bad cough. But you do not need to purr on him right now.

Yes, it would be good to have a friend and helper like Fuck. I wish I had one too.

No, Fuck is not my helper. I have a different helper, whose name is Pilar. She died, and took the form of a plant, and now she lives with the bees.

Yes, I talk to her even if I can’t see her. But she is not quite so … she is not so abrupt as Fuck. She is less like thunder, and more like a breeze.

I will tell you the story of Pilar some other time.

So Zeb wandered deeper and deeper into dangerous places, where there were a great many bad men doing cruel and hurtful things. And then he came to a place where they cooked and ate the Children of Oryx, which he knew was wrong. And when he called on Fuck for advice, Fuck told him he had to leave that place. And then he lived in some houses with water all around, and he came to know a snake. But it was dangerous there; and he said, Oh Fuck! And Fuck flew through the air, and spoke to Zeb, and said he would help Zeb get away safely.

That’s enough of the story for tonight. You already know that Zeb got away safely because he’s sitting right over there, isn’t he? And he’s very happy to be hearing this story. That is why he is laughing now, and not coughing any more.

Thank you for saying good night. I am happy to know that you want me to sleep soundly, without bad dreams.

Good night to you, as well.

Yes, good night.

Good night!

That’s enough. You can stop saying good night now.

Thank you.

Floating World

One day Zeb woke up next to Wynette, the SecretBurgers meatslinger, and realized that she smelled like grilled patties and stale cooking oil. As he did himself, granted, but that was different, because it always is, says Zeb, when it’s your own smell. But it’s not what you want the object of your lust to smell like. This is a primate thing, it’s basic, they’ve done the tests. Ask any of the MaddAddamite biogeeks here.

And the onions, don’t forget them, and the gruesome red sauce in squeeze bottles the customers craved so much it most likely had crack in it. When things got energetic and there was a brawl, someone would always go for that red sauce and start squirting it around. Then it would get mixed in with the scalp-wound splatter blood and you couldn’t tell whether someone was bleeding to death or had only been doused with red sauce.

The way that combo of smells would seep into their clothing and hair and even the skin pores was unavoidable, working where the two of them did. You couldn’t wash off that stink even when there was shower water available, and it didn’t blend too well with the cheap glop Wynette would rub on herself to neutralize it: Delilah, it was called, in lotion and cologne forms both, and it was heavy going, like wading through a sea of dying lilies, or a clutch of elderly church-women of the kind that populated the Church of PetrOleum. Those two smells — the SecretBurgers, the Delilah — were okay if you were really hungry or really horny, or both. But not so sweet otherwise.

Fuck, Zeb thought, lying there newly awakened that morning and inhaling the dire potpourri. There’s no future in this.

Or if there was a future, it was a negative one, because in addition to smelling funny Wynette was getting nosy. In the name of love and getting to know and understand the real, total him, she wanted to explore his deeper depths, figuratively speaking. She wanted his lid off. If she pried too hard — if she unwrapped one after another of his flimsy cover stories, which he hadn’t constructed with enough care, he realized, and he vowed to do better next time he conned someone — if she did the unwrapping, there was nothing very convincing immediately underneath. And then if she kept going, she might make some guesses about where he’d come from and who he’d been originally, and then it would only be a matter of time before she weaselled on him so she could collect whatever greyland reward must be on offer, out there in the word-of-mouth rat networks of the pleeblands.

Zeb had no doubt that there was such a reward. There might even be some of his biometrics circulating, such as photos of his ears, and animated silhouettes of his walk, and his schooltime thumbprints. Wynette wasn’t connected gangwise so far as he knew, and luckily she was too poor to own a PC or a tab. But there was cheap netstuff available on time-rental in cafés, and she might do some identity surfing if he pissed her off enough.

Already she was beginning to emerge from the initial sex-induced coma created by him through the magic of his first-contact-with-aliens puppy-on-speed gonadal enthusiasm. Young guys have no taste as such in sexual matters — no discrimination. They’re like those penguins that shocked the Victorians, they’ll bonk anything with a cavity, and Wynette had been the beneficiary in Zeb’s case. Not to brag, but during their nightly tangles her eyes had rolled so far up into her head that she looked like the undead half the time, and the amplified rockband noises she made had caused thumping and banging both from the alcohol store on the ground floor and from whatever nestful of mournful wage slaves lived above them.

But now she was mistaking Zeb’s animal energies for something more profound. She wanted post-hump chat. She wanted them to share their essences, on a spiritual level. She was starting to ask things like, were her breasts big enough, and did this colour of lime green look good on her, and why weren’t they doing it twice a night the way they did at first? Questions that mantrapped you any way you answered. These nightly interrogation sessions were becoming wearisome. Maybe, Zeb concluded, his feelings for Wynette hadn’t been true love after all.

“Don’t look at me like that. I was really young. And don’t forget, I’d been improperly socialized,” says Zeb.

“Look at you like what?” says Toby. “It’s darker than the inside of a goat. You can’t see me.”

“I can feel the glacial chill of your stone-cold gaze.”

“I just feel sorry for her, that’s all,” says Toby.

“No, you don’t. If I’d stayed with her, I wouldn’t be here with you, right?”

“Okay. True enough. I withdraw the sorrow. But still.”

He wasn’t a complete shit about it. He left Wynette some cash and a note of undying adoration, with a P.S. saying that his life had been threatened because of a dirty deal — he didn’t say what kind — and he couldn’t bear the thought of putting her in peril because of him.

“You used that word?” says Toby. “Peril?”

“She liked romance,” says Zeb. “Knights and stuff. She had some old paperbacks; they’d been in the room when she rented it. Falling apart.”

“And you didn’t want to play the knight?”

“Not for her,” says Zeb. “For you” — he kisses the tips of her fingers — “swords at dawn, any time.”

“I can’t believe that,” says Toby. “You’ve just told me what a liar you are!”

“At least I take the trouble to lie, for you,” says Zeb. “Lying’s more work than the bare-naked truth. Think of it as a courtship display. I’m aging badly, I’ve got wear and tear, I don’t have a giant blue dong like our Craker friends out there, so I need to use my wits. What’s left of them.”

Zeb travelled hastily south on the Truck-A-Pillar route, coming to rest in the remnants of Santa Monica. The rising sea had swept away the beaches, and the once-upmarket hotels and condos were semi-flooded. Some of the streets had become canals, and nearby Venice was living up to its name. The district as a whole was known as the Floating World, and it really was floating most of the time, especially when the full moon brought a spring tide.

None of the original owners lived there any more. Unable to collect insurance — for what was the encroaching sea but an Act of God? — they’d fled uphill. Squatters and transients of many kinds had moved in, though there were no municipal services left: the sewage system and the water mains were kaput, and the electricity had been cut off some time ago.

But the district had acquired a raunchy cachet, and middle-aged punters from posher locations on higher ground were willing to venture down to the Floating World for the odd dose of bohemian thrill, navigating the drowned streets in tiny runabout water taxis with solar putt-putt engines on them. They came for the gambling and the illegal-substance dealing and the girls, but also for the real-time carny acts that operated from building to crumbling building, moving shop when the premises got too waterlogged or when a violent storm had swept away yet more of the shoreline and the real estate.

Much was on offer in the Floating World; profitably so, since none of the operators paid rent or taxes. There was a crap game in progress morning and night, with a revolving set of bleary-eyed players left unsatisfied by online gaming and craving the addictive nerve-jangle of potential danger. In addition, they wanted freedom from oversight: they believed that the internet was as full of peepholes as a Truck-A-Pillar motel, and they didn’t want to leave any of their virtual DNA on it.

There was a moppet shop, with a mix of real girls and prostibots, depending on how much pre-programmed interaction you wanted, not that you could always tell the difference. There was a group of street acrobats who did torch-lit high-wire acts on ropes strung across the flooded streets, and sometimes fell and broke parts of themselves, such as their necks. The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.

Among the carny acts there was a magician, a sad-eyed guy of maybe fifty, with a baggy-kneed suit he must have purloined from a thrift store: there wasn’t a lot of margin in what he did. He’d set up a makeshift stage on the rapidly mildewing mezzanine floor of a former platinum-grade hotel, where he manipulated cards and coins and handkerchiefs, and sawed women in half and made them disappear from cabinets, and read minds. Those delights had vanished from television and online, since such displays of skill lacked tangibility in the digital realm and were therefore distrusted: how could you tell it wasn’t just special effects? But when the Floating World magician put a handful of needles into his mouth you could see they were real needles, and when they emerged threaded you could touch the thread; and when he threw a pack of cards up into the air and the ace of spades stayed there on the ceiling, you’d seen that happen in real time, right in front of your eyes.

The mezzanine was always crowded on Friday and Saturday nights when the Floating World magician put on his shows. He called himself Slaight of Hand, after Allan Slaight, a twentieth-century historian of the hermetic arts. Though few in the audience would know that.

Zeb learned it, however, because it was with Slaight of Hand that he found work. He played Lothar, the muscular assistant, clad in a cornball outfit made of faux-fur leopard skin. He’d heave the cabinet around, turning it upside down to show there was nothing in it, or he’d place the beautiful girl assistant into the box in which she would be sawn in two. Though sometimes he posed as an audience member, gathering information for the mind-reading act, or expressing amazement and thus distracting attention. In the daytimes he was sent on shopping errands outside the Floating World, to where there were mini-supermarkets and people who were awake during the day.

“I learned a lot from old Slaight of Hand,” Zeb says.

“How to saw a woman in half?”

“That too, though anyone can saw a woman in half. The trick is to have them smile while you’re doing it.”

“I guess that takes mirrors,” Toby says. “And smoke.”

“I’m sworn to secrecy. Best thing old Slaight taught me was misdirection. Make them look at something else, away from what you’re really doing, and you can get away with a lot. Slaight called each one of his beautiful assistants Miss Direction. It was his generic name for them.”

“Maybe he couldn’t tell one from another?”

“Maybe not. They didn’t interest him in that way. But they had to look good in sequins, not very many sequins. The Miss Direction of the moment was Katrina Wu, a lynx-eyed Asian-Fusion hybrid from Palo Alto. I thought of her as Katrina WooWoo, and tried to get friendly with her — Wynette the SecretBurgers meatslinger had opened up a whole world of possibility, and I was feeling reckless — but Miss Direction WooWoo was having none of it. I held her in my arms every weekend while stuffing her into boxes and cabinets to be sawed and disappeared and laying her out on a table so she could be levitated, and I’d give her the odd squeeze and what I must’ve thought was a marrow-melting leer, but she’d hiss at me through her smile: Stop that right now.”

“You do a good hiss. Maybe getting sawed in half was using up all her vital fluids.”

“Nope. One of the high-wire acrobats was taking care of those. During the week, when she wasn’t working for Slaight of Hand, this guy was teaching her trapeze dancing; the two of them were working on a high-wire strip act. She had a couple of outfits for that: a bird one, a snakeskin one. For the snake act she also had a real snake: some sort of lobotomized python. Its name was March because, according to Miss WooWoo, March was a month of hope, and her python was always hopeful.

“She appeared to like the thing; she’d drape it around her neck during some of her acts, let it do some writhing on her. I got friendly with March, I used to catch mice for it. I figured those terrorized mice could be a way to the WooWoo heart, but no dice.”

“What is it about women and snakes?” says Toby. “Or women and birds, for that matter.”

“We like to think you’re wild animals,” says Zeb. “Underneath the decorations.”

“You mean stupid? Or subhuman?”

“Cut me some slack here. I mean, ferociously out of control, in a good way. A scaly, feathery woman is a powerful attraction. She’s got an edge to her, like a goddess. Risky. Extreme.”

“Okay, we’ll split the difference. So then what?”

“Then what was that Katrina WooWoo and the high-wire guy took off one day. And March the python — March went with them. That bothered me at the time, not the snake so much, but Miss WooWoo. Infected as I was by Cupid’s festering dart. I confess I moped.”

“I can’t imagine you moping,” says Toby.

“I did, though. Pain in the butt, I was. Not that anyone noticed, so I was mostly a pain in the butt to myself. Word on the street was that Katrina and the trapeze guy had headed east to make their fortune. Couple of years later I found out that they’d used the snake-and-bird motif and launched an upmarket gents’ joint called Scales and Tails. Started small, became a franchise. That was before the sex trades got taken over by the Corps.”

“Like the Scales in the Sinkhole, near the Edencliff Rooftop Garden? Adult entertainment?”

“You got it. Where the Gardener kids used to glean leftover wine, for making the vinegar. Same franchise. Anyway, saved my ass at a crucial moment, but I’ll tell you about that later.”

“Is this going to be about you and that snake woman? You finally scored? I can hardly wait to hear. Was the python in on it too?”

“Ease up. I’m trying to stick with the chronological order here. And hey, not everything’s about my sex life.”

Toby wants to say that a lot of it has been so far, but she refrains: it’s not fair to demand the whole story and then object to it, she does realize that. “Okay, fire away,” she says.

“After Katrina WooWoo disappeared from the Floating World, old Slaight of Hand wandered away in search of another Miss Direction, and maybe a more aesthetically attractive performance space that wasn’t falling into the water. I was at loose ends, which was most likely good, since — being on the lookout for the next best thing, with eyes open and ears pricked — I noticed a couple of guys hanging around who were making too much of an effort to fit in, riffraff-wise. You can tell when a man is new to his greasy ponytail, his raggedy ’stache, and his garish nose jewellery: too much face fiddling. And their pants were wrong. They hadn’t made the mistake of new ones, like Chuck, but their rips and tears and smears were too artful. Or that was my judgment. So I was on the next Truck-A-Pillar I could hitch a ride with.

“This time I went all the way down to Mexico. I figured that whatever tentacles the Rev could stretch out weren’t likely to reach that far.”

The Hackery

There was a surplus of paranoid drug peddlers in Mexico who assumed that Zeb was a paranoid drug peddler too, and that their interests clashed with his. After a few too many episodes in which men with arcane tattoos and designs of tulips razored onto their scalps gave him the full frontal scowl, plus a couple of near-misses with knives to make things clear, he moved down the map, shedding spare change all the way. For incidentals he paid cash only: he didn’t want to leave a cybertrail, even the cybertrail of someone named John and then Roberto and then Diaz.

From Cozumel he hopped through the Caribbean Islands, then over to Colombia. But although he further honed the skill of drinking with strangers in bars, and survived those lessons and a few others, nothing in Bogotá held any possibilities for him; in addition to which, he stood out too much.

Rio was another story. Its nickname then was The Hackery; that was before the mini-drone raids and the electrical-grid sabotage events that sent the truly serious operators — those who’d survived — into the Cambodian jungles to set up shop anew. But Rio then was at its zenith. It was said to be the Wild West of the web, filled with youthful bristle-faced blackhat cyberhustlers of every possible nationality. There were hordes of potential customers: businesses were spying on businesses, politicians were setting nets for other politicians, and then there were the military interests: these paid the most of all, though they also did a moderately full security check on prospective employees, and Zeb didn’t want that. But all in all, Rio was a seller’s market: quick hands for hire, no questions asked, and no matter what you looked like you’d blend in down there as long as you looked odd enough.

He was out of practise keyboard-wise, considering the time he’d spent slinging meat, aiding Slaight of Hand, ogling Miss Direction, and python-wrestling, but it didn’t take him long to get his flexibility back. Then he went looking for work. He found an opening suitable to his talents within a week.

His first employer was Ristbones, an outfit that specialized in the hacking of electronic voting machines. That had been easy in the first decade of the century, and also profitable — if you controlled the machines, you could slip in whichever candidate you wanted, as long as the real vote was close to being split — but outrage had been expressed and fusses had been made, and the appearance of democracy was still considered worth preserving back then; so firewalls had been installed and the pickwork was now more complex.

It was also boring — sort of like crocheting, working through the fairly elementary lacework that was more for show than for actual prevention. You could zizz off on the job trying to interest yourself. So when he had an offer from Hacksaw Inc. he took it, a little too rapidly as it turned out. He wasn’t drunk at the time, but vodka was involved. That, and a lot of backslapping and loud comradely laughs and compliments. The pickup was made by three suave guys, one with large hands and another with large money. The third was probably the eliminator: he didn’t say much.

Hacksaw was located on a joyboat moored off Rio and posing as an anything-goes sex bazaar. Not just a pose, either, because you could get everything there from chicken soup to nuts, on or off the bone, screams-for-sale extra. He spent a nervous four weeks on that deathstar working for a pod of seedy Russian pussy-smugglers who were tiring of the whininess and bleediness and need-to-feed of their human merchandise and were aiming to supplement their income in ways that required less soft tissue. They put Zeb to work hacking into online PachinkoPoker for skimming purposes, and it was a mite stressful because — said the other code slaves — the Hacksaw folk were known to heave you into the luminous krill if they thought you were taking too long unravelling the digital embroidery.

Or else if you were befriending the software. Misusing it was fine, so long as not much in the way of merchandise was damaged, since damage was a privilege reserved for paying customers. A few weekly free-time coupons for hackstaff were included in the paypacket, along with some complimentary gambling chips and the meals and drinks. But sentimental attachments were strictly off-limits.

The sex bazaar side of the Hacksaw business was beyond tawdry; especially the kids, they were lifting them from the favelas on a limited-time-use basis, turning them over, and fishfooding them at a fast clip. That part was too close to the Rev and his child-rearing practises for Zeb’s tastes, and he must’ve let that show because the cordiality of the jovial comrades was waning rapidly. After working only a month of his contract he’d managed to sneak a go-fast boat by sharing a few vodkas with the Russian guard and then whacking him and pocketing his identity and overboarding him. That was the first time he’d killed anyone, and it was too bad for the guard, a non-too-bright bullet-head who should’ve known better than to trust a callow though not small and — by definition, considering he was working for Hacksaw — devious youth like Zeb.

He took a few lines of Hacksaw code with him, and a few passwords. Those could come in handy. He also took one of the girls. He’d sweet-talked her into acting as his very own Miss Direction: he used his coupons to book an hour of her time, then got her to walk past the booze-addled guard in what passed for her nightie — some shred of cheeseclothy fabric — looking just seductive enough and just furtive enough — Where you going? — to get the coconut-brain to turn his head.

Zeb could have left the girl on the joyboat, but he felt sorry for her. The comrades would figure out that she’d acted the decoy, wittingly or unwittingly they wouldn’t care, and they’d mash her like a potato. She was only on the boat because she’d been lured away from her home town in rustbucket Michigan by spurious enticements and a few chunks of third-rate flattery. She’d been told she had talent; she’d been told the job was dancing.

He hadn’t been so thick as to take the go-fast boat to a regular marina. The comrades might already have noticed the two absences — three, including the guard — and be on the prowl. He docked at one of the shore hotels and hid the girl behind an ornamental fountain until he could gain entrance to the corridors by booking a room with the guard’s identity. Then he worked out the master code, snuck into a well-stocked bedroom, and lifted some clothes for her, and a shirt for himself as well: too small, but he rolled up the sleeves. He left a threatening Miss Direction note scrawled on the bathroom mirror in soap: I Come Back Later. Revenge. Chances were that nine-tenths of the guys staying in places like that would have at least one violent and resentful thug in their past, and would thus leave the hotel rapidly without complaining about their missing wardrobe items.

Or their car keys. Or their car.

Once they were far enough away, he found a net café where he could lilypad to one of his.09 per cent secret stashes, then transfer a lump of that to a different account and pay it out to himself; after which, he erased all traces. Then he borrowed another car that just happened to be available. People were careless.

So far, so good; but then there was the girl. Her name was Minta, which made him think of organic chewing gum. Fresh, green. She’d held firm during their escape, she hadn’t lost her nerve, she’d been silent. Most likely she’d also been in shock, because she hadn’t lasted. There was decay from the inside, whether mental or physical he couldn’t tell.

She was all right when they were in view, on the street or in a store — she could act normal for short periods — but when they were inside, in this room or that room or even in a car, zigzagging their way north and west, she would spend the time at her two specialties, crying hopelessly and staring vacantly. Television was no distraction for her, nor was sex. Understandably enough she didn’t want Zeb to touch her, though out of gratitude and as a form of payment she offered anything he might want in the way of his being touched himself.

“So you took her up on it?” Toby says, keeping her voice light. How can she be jealous of such a wreck, such a wraith?

“No, as a matter of fact,” Zeb says. “No joy in that. Might as well hire a prostibot wank robot in a mall. It was more fun for me to tell her she didn’t have to. After that she did let me hug her a little. I thought it might calm her down, but it only made her shiver.”

Minta started hearing things — stealthy footsteps, heavy breathing, a metallic clanking sound — and she was frightened every time she went out of whatever squalid hotel room they were staying in. Zeb could have afforded classier lodgings, but it was better to keep to the deep pleeblands, in the shadows.

Sad to say, Minta ended by jumping off a balcony in San Diego. He wasn’t in the room at the time, he’d been out getting her a coffee, but he saw the crowd gathering and heard the siren. Which meant he had to leave town in a hurry to avoid the investigation, if any; which in turn meant that his description might be top of the list as a murder suspect, supposing the authorities decided to follow up, which increasingly they didn’t. Anyway, where would they start? Minta had no identity. He’d abandoned nothing of his — he made a point of taking everything with him whenever he left a room — but who knows if there were security cameras anywhere near? Not likely in the pleeb shadowlands, but you never knew.

He made it up to Seattle, where he took a quick peek into the Birth of Venus zephyr dropbox he shared with Adam. There was a message for him: “Confirm you’re still in the body.” Adam sometimes echoed the Rev’s speech patterns in a creepy way.

“In whose body?” Zeb posted in reply.

It was an old joke of his: he always used to make fun of that pious no-longer-in-the-body funeral talk of the Rev’s. He made that joke so Adam would know it was really him, not some decoy impersonator. In fact, Adam had most likely planted that in-body query on purpose because he’d know Zeb couldn’t resist it; whereas a fake Zeb would just give a straight answer. Adam was usually a few twists ahead of the curve.

His next move was up to Whitehorse. He’d heard about Bearlift in a Rio bar and figured it would be a good place to hide out, since nobody would be expecting him to go there. Not Hacksaw, who had a score to settle: they’d look for him in some other hackers’ hotspot, such as Goa. And not the Rev either: Zeb had never shown the least interest in wildlife.

“So that,” says Zeb, “is how I wound up on the Mackenzie Mountain Barrens wearing a bear skin, and jumping onto a trail biker, and getting mistaken for Bigfoot the Sasquatch.”

“Understandable,” says Toby. “They might have thought that even without the bear skin.”

“You being snarky?”

“It’s a compliment.”

“I’ll mull that over. Anyway, I wasn’t sad about the way it turned out.”

Fast-forward to Whitehorse again: there he was, washed, dressed, and in his right mind, supposing there was such a thing. He was avoiding the Bearlift headquarters and the usual drinking holes because those people thought he was dead, and why would he want to sacrifice the advantages that non-existence can bring? So he was spending a fair amount of time in the motel room eating faux-peanut objects and sending out for pizza and watching pay-per-view, never mind what, and trying to figure out his next move. Where to go from Whitehorse? How to get out? What was his next incarnation of choice?

Also he was wondering, Who set Chuck up to stick that needle into him? Which of the several parties with an interest in his ill-being would use an inept, A-sombrero dink like Chuck as their choice of poison-dart launcher?

Cold Dish

He existed in two states: his actual camouflaged mode, an anyface with a bogus name; and, in his previous guise, fried to a crisp in a ’thopter crash. Pity about that, some might say, but very convenient for others. And convenient for himself as well.

But he didn’t want Adam to think he was dead — there’d been a long communications hiatus during the Bearlift caper — so he needed to make contact before news of that kind leaked out.

He put on all his clothes, including the aviator helmet, the fake goosedown puffy jacket, and the sunglasses, and made a foray to one of the two local net cafés, a tidy operation called Cubs’ Corner that served turgid organic soy beverages and undercooked giant muffins. He ordered both: eating the local foods was a principle of his. Then he paid cash for a half-hour of net time and sent a message to Adam via the zephyr dropbox. “Some shithead tried to mort me. Everyone thinks I’m f-ing dead.”

He picked up the answer in ten minutes: “Renouncing profanity will improve your digestion. Stay dead. May have job opportunity. Get to New New York area ASAP, connect with me then.”

“OK, get me jobcheck ID?” he sent back.

“Y. Will be waiting,” Adam replied. Where was he? No clue about that. But he must have landed in a place where he felt safe, or safe enough. That was a relief to Zeb. Losing Adam would be like losing an arm and a leg. And the top part of his head.

He went back to his motel room and thought through the logistics of getting himself to New New York. As a dead person, and with the aid of the temporary patchwork ID he’d put together, he might chance the bullet train once he’d Truck-A-Pillared as far as, say, Calgary.

But the main puzzle was still bothering him. Who’d wanted to nab him via Chuck? He tried to narrow it down. First of all, who could’ve figured out where he was? Fingered him at Bearlift? By that time his name was Devlon, and before that it was Larry, and before that, Kyle. He didn’t look much like a Kyle, but sometimes it was better to go counter-type. And he’d been through at least six earlier names.

He’d bought the better part of the identities on the greyer than grey market, and there was no upside for those guys to sell him out: they had their businesses to run, they had to maintain customer confidence, and anyway they wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint a buyer for him. To them he was just one more shirker on the run from bad debts, or rapacious wives, or embezzlement from a Corp, or IP theft, or robbing a convenience store, or a string of psycho murders involving crossdressing and crowbars; they didn’t care what. They’d do a preliminary ask, they pretended to have standards and ethics — no baby-fuckers — and he’d serve them up some platters of refried bullshit they both knew was crap. But it was polite to exchange this kind of pewl, just like they’d say, “Happy to help” and so forth, which meant “Let’s see the cash.”

So for any cybersleuth to pry him out of his layers of fake shell would’ve meant the expenditure of considerable resources. He’d covered his trail well enough unless they’d known exactly where to look. Whoever it was would need to be very motivated.

He more or less ruled out Ristbones because what did he have on them that could mess them up if leaked? Voting machine hacking was an open secret, but though there was grumbling in the so-called press, nobody really wanted to go back to the old paper system, and the Corp that owned the machines, picked the winners, and took the kickbacks had done a lunar PR job, so anyone who objected too much was smeared as a twisted Commie bent on spoiling everyone’s fun, even the fun of those who weren’t having any fun. But spoiling the fun they might have later. Their fun-in-the-sky.

So he was no threat to Ristbones because even if he did try to rouse some sort of mouldy civil-society rabble, anyone who’d listen to him would be credited with a terminal case of brain herpes. If he’d been crazy, he might’ve tried to double-hack the machines — code in his own virtual senator or something — just as a demo project about how easy it was.

“But you weren’t crazy,” says Toby.

“I might have done it for the lulz, if I’d had the time. It would have been one of those ephemeral pranks by which sulky keyboard geniuses like me used to signal their ineffectual objections to the system.”

“So, not Ristbones, then,” says Toby. “Must have been Hacksaw?”

“They had a case for payback,” says Zeb. “I’d fishfooded their guard, pilfered their boat, robinhooded one of their maidens in distress; but worse, I’d made them look sloppy. I could see them wanting to stage-manage a public example of me — string me up in chains from a bridge or similar, minus a leg and all my blood; turn me into a gristle display. But in order to capitalize on the publicity they’d have to reveal what I’d done to them, so they’d still lose face.

“Anyway I couldn’t see them tracking me as far as Bearlift, way up there in Whitehorse. It was very far from Rio, and most likely they thought it was covered with snow and igloos, if they ever thought about it at all. But more than that, I couldn’t see a tightass like Chuck working for those guys. I couldn’t even picture them in the same bar together. The Hacksaw types needed to be in a bar with you before they’d take you on, and Chuck didn’t compute. He had the wrong wardrobe. None of the Hacksaw guys would be caught dead hiring a guy with such dorky pants.”

The more he thought about Chuck — about the yucky-clean Chuckiness of Chuck — the more he figured that was the key. The smarmy friendliness, the fake white-toothed geniality … He had to be Church of PetrOleum. But no way the Rev and his buds, even hired professional buds, could’ve tracked Zeb through all his twists and turns. Just no fucking way.

Then he figured he was looking at the whole thing backwards. The Rev, and the whole Church, and their religious joined-at-the-hippers like the Known Fruits, and their political pals — they were all death on ecofreaks. Their ads featured stuff like a cute little blond girl next to some particularly repellent threatened species, such as the Surinam toad or the great white shark, with a slogan saying: This? or This? Implying that all cute little blond girls were in danger of having their throats slit so the Surinam toads might prosper.

By extension, anyone who liked smelling the daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God’s Holy Oil, which were one and the same. And Bearlift, despite its fuzzy reasoning and its clumsy delivery system, was in a geographical area where more oil might well be discovered, or through which it might well be piped, with the usual malfunctions, spills, and coverups.

So naturally the Rev and his circle would’ve tried to infiltrate Bearlift. Which was none too choosy about who it let in. Chuck must’ve been a true PetrOleum believer, sent there to keep an eye on the furfuckers and report on the evils they were concocting. He wouldn’t have been looking for Zeb in particular, though when he stumbled across him he would’ve recognized him. He’d been close to the Rev, then: family picture sharing. The ungrateful son. But you … The son I wish I’d had. Sigh. Wistful smile. Hand on shoulder. Gruff, manly pat-pat. Like that.

The rest would have followed: the snitch report by Chuck, the instructions from the Rev, the obtaining of the knockout needle, the failed attempt in the ’thopter. The flaming wreckage.

Which made Zeb feel angry all over again.

He put on all his clothes once more and sallied forth to send another batch of messages. This time he used the other net café in town, PrestoThumbs, a seedier place in a mini-mall. It was right next to a haptic-feedback remote-sex emporium called The Real Feel: “The Real Feel, The Real Deal! Keep It Safe! Thrills, Spills, No Microbes!” But he resisted nostalgia and walked past The Real Feel and logged on at Thumbs.

First he sent a message to the ranking Elder at the Church of PetrOleum, attaching the Rev’s embezzlement data and informing him that the actual cash would be found not in the Canary Islands Grand Cayman bank account, where it actually was, but in the form of stocks, in a metal box buried under Trudy’s rock garden. He advised the Elder to take not only six men with shovels but also a team of security minions armed with tasers, as the Rev was armed and could be dangerous. He signed the message “Argus.” The hundred-eyed giant from Greek mythology, that was him: there were pictures of the guy on the same site that hosted The Birth of Venus. Not that having a hundred eyes made you attractive from an aesthetic point of view. There was a goddess on there with a hundred tits, yet another illustration of the fact that more is not always better.

Having ruined — he hoped — the Rev’s upcoming evening, he cleaned out the Rev’s secret Cayman account. He’d peeked at it from time to time during his travels to make sure the Rev had followed instructions and was leaving it alone. Yup, it was all still there. He transferred the whole works to an account he’d set up for Adam under the name of Rick Bartleby, for whom he’d also created a convincing identity: Rick was an undertaker in Christchurch, New Zealand. He left Adam a message saying he’d find an account number and a password and a big surprise via the right nipple of Venus. It did him good to picture Adam clicking — finally — on a nipple.

He felt it was only right to send a message to Bearlift as well: let them know they’d been infiltrated by Chuck, say maybe they should do more of a background check on smarmy rear-lickers who turned up out of the blue, especially in new clothes with too many pockets, and maybe alert them to the fact that not everyone found them and their furfucking ways as charming as they found themselves. He signed that message “Bigfoot,” which he regretted as soon as he’d hit Send: it was a little too close to a hint.

Then he went back to his crappy motel and sat in the bar where they had a flat-screen, and waited for results from the Rev-O-Rama Show. Sure enough, the discovery of the bones and shreds of Fenella made the evening TV news all over the country. There was the Rev, covering his face while being led away; there was Trudy, sweet as a milkshake, dabbing at her eyes, saying she’d had no idea, and how frightening to have been living all these years with a ruthless killer.

Smart play, points to Trudy: there was no way they could pin anything on her. By that time she must’ve known about the Rev’s secret stash of cash — the Elders would have questioned her about the embezzled funds — and guessed he’d been planning to ditch her. To head out to an offshore safe house, where he could do some basking, and some fondling of underage children, or some flaying of them, whichever appealed to him at the moment. Because of course she’d known, she’d known about his twistiness all along. But she’d chosen not to know.

He got into his winter layers again and hiked to Cubs’ Corner, where he sent another message to Adam — a short one, just the URL for where the news item on the arrest was to be found. Adam would surely be pleased: with the Rev out of commission or at least seriously curtailed, both of them could breathe a little easier.

But he needed to leave Whitehorse immediately. The criminal justice folks or equivalent could be trying to trace the message he’d sent to the PetrOleum Elder, and, if they succeeded, they’d start sifting through Whitehorse, which wasn’t huge. They wouldn’t be looking for Zeb as such — he was dead — but any looking would be bad looking, and it wouldn’t take them long to crosshair his position. Maybe they already had: he was getting a bad feeling about that.

So he didn’t go back to the motel. Instead he loped out to the nearest highway Truck-A-Pillar stop and hopped a convoy. Once in Calgary, he was able to slide himself onto the sealed bullet train, and after a couple of changes, and before you could say Maybe I Just Did a Really Stupid Thing, he was in New New York.

“A really stupid thing?” says Toby.

“Turning the Rev in and grabbing all his money maybe wasn’t so bright,” says Zeb. “He must’ve guessed then that I wasn’t really dead. You know what they say about revenge — it’s a dish that should be eaten cold, meaning you shouldn’t do it out of anger because you’ll fuck it up.”

“But you didn’t,” says Toby. “Fuck it up.”

“It was almost a fuckup. But I was lucky,” says Zeb. “Look, here comes the moon. Some people would call that romantic.”

Sure enough, there it is, rising above the trees to the east, almost full, almost red.

Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it’s coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.

Blacklight Headlamp

New New York was on the Jersey shore, or what was now the shore. Not many people lived in Old New York any more, though it was officially a no-go zone and thus a no-rent zone so a few denizens were still willing to take their chances in the disintegrating, waterlogged, derelict buildings. Not Zeb, though; he didn’t have webbed feet and a death wish, and New New York — though no paradise — had more people in it, and therefore more background and cover. More of a crowd to blend into.

Once arrived, he ducked into a shoddy soft-pretzel-infested net café and sent a checking-in message to Adam — Plan A Yay, What’s Plan B? — then cooled his heels while Adam took his time, wherever the fuck he was, whatever the fuck he was up to. His latest terse communication had read merely CU soon.

Zeb had gone to ground in an erstwhile high-life pool-enabled party-roomed condo complex called Starburst — after a firework, perhaps, but at present suggestive of charred interstellar debris. Starburst had reached its half-life some time ago: the once-expensive iron scrollwork gate served mainly as a dogwiddle station, and the mouldy, leaking buildings had been turned into divided-space unit rentals. These hosted a coral-reef ecosystem of dealers and addicts and pilotfish and drunks and hookers and pyramid scheme fly-by-nighters and jackals and shell-gamers and rent-gougers, all parasitizing one another.

Meanwhile the Starburst owners dodged the needed repairs and waited for the next spin cycle. First the low-rent artists would move in, full of piss and vinegar and resentment and the delusion that they could change the world. Then the startup designers and graphics companies, hoping a sheen of grubby cool would rub off on them. After that would come the questionable gene-peddler storefronts and the fashion pimps and pseudo galleries and latest-thing restaurant openings, with molecular-mix fusion involving dry ice and labmeat and quorn, and daring little garnishes of dwindling species: starling’s tongue pâté had been a fad of late, in such places. The Starburst owners were most likely a bunch of guys who’d cashed in via some superCorp and wanted to fool around in real estate. Once the starling’s tongue pâté phase had kicked in, they’d knock down the decaying unit rentals and erect a whole batch of new limited-shelf-life upmarket condos.

But Starburst was nowhere near that sweet spot yet, so Zeb was safe there as long as he minded his own business and shambled enough so anyone looking would think he was just another brain-damaged stoner. He stayed away from everyone and anything because he didn’t want to attract any Chuck-like infiltrators.

He knew from his dips into the news that although the Rev was awaiting trial, he was out on bail and issuing statements about his innocence: he was the victim of an anti-religion and anti-Oleum left-wing cabal that had kidnapped and murdered his saintly first wife, Fenella, and then had maliciously spread the rumour that she’d run away to partake of an immoral life; which, since the Rev had believed it, had been an ongoing torture to him. This dastardly cabal had then planted Fenella in the Rev’s yard for the sole purpose of casting dirt upon his name and of sullying the reputation of the Holy Oleum itself.

The Rev on bail would therefore be living in his house, and would thus have access to his Church of PetrOleum network — if not the true true believers, who were no doubt shunning him because of the embezzlement charges, then at least the more cynical wing, the ones who were in it for the money. And he’d be filled to the brim with cold, rancorous vengefulness because he would deeply suspect who was to blame for the tipoff about Fenella’s pitiful bones turning to plant nutrients in his rock garden.

Meanwhile, main-chance Trudy had sold an autobiographical plaint and was doing numerous online interviews. How deceived she’d been by the Rev, having been convinced when she married him that he was a grieving widower dedicated to the greater good, and she so much wanted to be a partner in his pious works, and a mother to Fenella’s son, little Adam. No wonder that young man could not be found, as he was very sensitive, and would hate the glare of publicity as much as she did. How shattering it had been to awaken to the truth of the Rev’s murderous nature! Since learning of it, she’d prayed for Fenella’s soul and begged her forgiveness, even though she’d had no idea at the time about what had really happened. Because, like everyone else, she, Trudy, had believed the story about Fenella running off with some trashy Tex-Mex or other. She is ashamed of herself for having been so falsely judgmental.

And now some of her very own church members — people she’d thought of as brothers and sisters — were refusing to speak to her, and had even accused her of having been in on the Rev’s gory and larcenous activities all along. Only her faith had seen her through this testing and trying ordeal; and she longed for just one glimpse of her beloved lost son, Zebulon, who had strayed from the path, and no wonder, considering what sort of a father he had. But she prayed for him, wherever he was.

That beloved lost son fully intended to stay lost; though the temptation to hack into one of Trudy’s online weepies and impersonate a ghostly spirit voice and denounce her was very great. A fine line of DNA he’d inherited: a psychopath of a con artist for a dad, a selfish liar of a mother with an obsessive love of pelf. He could only hope that in addition to her narcissism and greed, Trudy was secretly a skanky cheat who’d pulled a fast one on the Rev and had it off with a dark stranger in the garden tool shed. If so, it was possibly from his real, nameless father — an itinerant spade and sod artist prone to bonking the be-ringed and be-bangled wives of his upper-echelon clients — that Zeb had inherited his more dubious talents: babe-charming, the knack for sneaking in and out of windows both real and virtual, discretion as the better part of valour, and a not always reliable cloak of invisibility.

Maybe that’s why the Rev hated Zeb so much: he knew Trudy had saddled him with a cuckoo in the nest, but he couldn’t get back at her directly because of their shared digging activities. He had to either kill her or put up with her, her and her sluttish ways. If only Zeb had thought to purloin some of the Rev’s DNA — a few hairs or toenail clippings — then he could get the tests done and set his mind at rest. Or not. But at least he’d be sure of his parentage, one way or the other.

No doubt about Adam, though: a definite Rev resemblance there. Though refined by the contribution of Fenella, of course. The poor girl was most likely a pious type — scrubbed hands, no nail polish, pulled-back hairdo, white panties devoid of trim — longing to do good and help people. A sitting duckie. His Warpiness had no doubt sold her on the idea that she would be a precious helpmeet to him and that this was a higher calling, though he’d have told her that one must forgo joy and pleasure as such in the service of him and his mission. Zeb guessed he’d have had no patience with the female orgasm. Crappy sex the two of them must have had, in any normal terms.

This was what Zeb thought about while watching daytime TV in his dank Starburst lair, or tossing on his lumpy, stained mattress while listening to the shouting and screaming going on outside his flimsily locked door. Animal spirits, drug-induced hilarity, hatred, fear, craziness. There were gradations to screams. It was the ones that stopped in the middle that you had to worry about.

Finally Adam came through. A meetup address, a time, and some instructions about what to wear. No red, no orange, a plain brown T-shirt if possible. No green: it was a politically charged colour, what with the vendetta against ecofreaks.

The address was a nondescript Happicuppa in New Astoria, not too near the semi-submerged and dangerously unstable buildings of the waterfront. Zeb sat crammed in behind one of the chi-chi little Happicuppa tables, on one of the teensy chairs that reminded him of kindergarten — he hadn’t fitted into those chairs either — nursing his Happicappuccino and fortifying himself with half a Joltbar, and wondering what sort of spitball Adam was about to toss his way. He’d have a job lined up for Zeb — otherwise he wouldn’t be calling for a meet — but what sort of job? Worm picker? Nightwatchman at a puppy mill? What order of contacts might Adam have been cultivating, wherever he had been?

Adam had hinted that he’d use an intermediary as the meetup courier, and Zeb worried about safety: the two of them had always been wary about trusting anyone except each other. True, Adam would be cautious. But he was methodical, and methodology could give you away. The only sure camouflage was unpredictability.

From his cramped chair Zeb eyed the entering customers, hoping to spot the courier. Was it this blond hermaphrodite in the halter top and sequined three-horned headdress? He hoped not. This plump, gum-chewing woman with the cream-coloured shorts and the wedgie and the retro cinch belt? She looked too vacuous, though vacuousness was a nearly foolproof disguise, at least for girls. Was it this mild, geeky-looking boy of the type that would some day machine-gun an auditorium full of his pimply fellow classmates? Nope, not him either.

But suddenly, surprise: there was Adam himself. It startled Zeb to see him materialize in the chair opposite, which had been empty just the moment before. Ectoplasmic, you could say.

Adam looked like a passport photo of himself, one that was already fading to light and shadow. It was as if he’d returned from the dead: he had that glowing-eyeball thing about him. His T-shirt was beige, his baseball cap sloganless. He’d bought himself a Happimocha to make it seem as if this was just two oddfellow buddies taking a break from their nerdwork, or else doing a meeting about some startup doomed to implode like a drowning blimp. Happimocha and Adam didn’t go together: Zeb was curious to see if he’d actually drink any of the stuff — something so impure.

“Don’t raise your voice,” were the first words Adam spoke. Not two seconds back in Zeb’s life and already he was giving orders.

“I was thinking of fucking yelling,” said Zeb. He waited to be told not to use profanity, but Adam didn’t take the bait. Zeb stared at him: there was something different. His eyes were just as round and blue, but his hair was paler. Could it be turning white? There was a new beard too, also pale. “Nice to see you too,” he added.

Adam smiled: a flicker of a smile. “You’ll be going into HelthWyzer West near San Francisco,” he said. “As a data inputter. I’ve fixed it up. When you leave here, pick up the shopping bag beside your left knee. Everything you’ll need is in there. You’ll have to get the scans and prints inserted in the ID — I’ve put the address for that. And you’ll need to scrap the old ID: delete anything online. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Where’ve you been, anyway?” said Zeb.

Adam smiled in that maddening, saintly way he had. Butter wouldn’t melt; it never had melted. “Classified,” he said. “Other lives involved.” That was the kind of thing that made Zeb long to put a toad in his bed.

“Right, slap my wrist. Okay, what’s this HelthWyzer West, and what’m I supposed to be doing in there?”

“It’s a Compound,” said Adam. “Research and innovation. Drugs, the medical kind; enriched vitamin supplements; materials for transgenic splices and gene enhancement, specifically the hormone blends and simulators. It’s a powerful Corp. There are a lot of top brains there.”

“How’d you get me in?” said Zeb.

“I have some new acquaintances,” said Adam, continuing his nonstop I-know-more-than-you smile. “They’ll watch out for you. You’ll be safe.” He looked past Zeb’s shoulder, then at his watch. Or he appeared to look at his watch. Zeb knew a good piece of misdirection when he saw it: Adam was scanning the room, checking for shadows.

“Cut the bullshit,” said Zeb. “You want me to do something for you.”

Adam held his smile. “You’ll be a blacklight headlamp,” he said. “Be extra careful checking in online, once you’re there. Oh, and there’s a new dropbox, and a new gateway into it. Don’t return to that zephyr site, it may have been compromised.”

“What’s a blacklight headlamp?” said Zeb. But Adam had already stood up and straightened his beige tee and was halfway to the door. He hadn’t drunk any of his Happimocha, so Zeb obligingly drank it for him. An unconsumed Happimocha might raise eyebrows in a pleeb like this, where only pimps had money to burn.

Zeb took his time getting back to Starburst. The back of his neck prickled all the way there, he was so sure he was being watched. But nobody tried to mug him. Once inside his door he looked up “blacklight headlamp” on his most recent cheap toss-at-will cellphone. “Blacklight” was a novelty item from the first decades of the century, he was told: it let you see in the dark, or it let you see some things in the dark. Eyeballs. Teeth. White bedsheets. Glo in the Dark Hair Gel. Fog. As for “headlamp,” it was what it said. Bicycle shops sold them, and camping suppliers. Not that anyone really went camping any more except inside derelict buildings.

Thanks a pile, Adam, thought Zeb. That is so fucking instructive.

Then he opened Adam’s shopping bag. There was his new skin, all neatly laid out for him. What he had to do now was Truck-A-Pillar over to San Francisco, and then crawl into it.

Intestinal Parasites, the Game

Adam’s preparations had been thorough. There was a burn-this to-do list, and a big envelope stuffed with cash because Zeb would need some to pay off the grey marketeer designated to fake his passes. There was plastic as well, so Zeb could get himself the kind of wardrobe Adam thought he should have. He’d supplied descriptions: casual geekwear, with brown cord pants and neutral Ts and plaid shirts — brown and grey — and a pair of round-eyed glasses that didn’t magnify anything. As for the footgear, the recommendation was trainers with so much rubber cross-strapping Zeb would look like a gay Morris dancer or some fugitive from a session of Robin Hood cosplay. Hat, a steampunk bowler from the 2010s: those were back in style. Though how would Adam know that? He’d never appeared to take any interest in vestments, but no interest was of course an interest. He must’ve been noting what other people wore so he could not wear it himself.

Zeb’s assigned name was Seth. A little biblical joke of Adam’s: Seth meant “appointed,” as they were both aware, since they’d had the main biblical names and stories drilled into their skulls with a figurative screwdriver. Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve, deputized to take the place of the murdered Abel, who wasn’t entirely dead, however, because he still had talking blood that cried out from the ground. So “Seth” was replacing the departed and presumed dead Zeb. By appointment, courtesy of Adam. Very funny.

Adam requested that Zeb/Seth test the new chatroom before entering HelthWyzer, and then check in once a week to signal he was still walking the planet. So the next day, while making his circuitous way to the grey marketeer to get his prints and iris scans inserted into his fake docs, he chose a net café at random and followed the lilypad trail laid out for him by Adam. (Memorize, then destroy, said the note, as if Zeb was a fucking idiot.)

The main gateway was a biogeek challenge game called Extinctathon. Monitored by MaddAddam, it said: Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play? Zeb entered the codename supplied to him by Adam — Spirit Bear — and the password, which was shoelaces, and found himself inside the game.

It seemed to be a variant of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. Using obscure clues provided by your opponent, you had to guess the identities of various extirpated beetles, fish, plants, skinks, and so forth. A roll call of the already erased. It was a certified yawner: even the CorpSeCorps would be put to sleep by this one, plus they’d have no clue as to most of the answers. As — to be fair — Zeb himself did not, despite his time spent with the Bearlifters and their obscure forms of one-upmanship. You haven’t heard of Steller’s sea cow? Really? Tiny, self-satisfied smirk.

Five minutes inside Extinctathon and any self-respecting Corps-Man would run screaming in search of alcoholic beverages. A terminally boring game was almost as effective as a vacuous stare, disguise-wise; plus they’d never think there was anything hidden inside a location that was right out in the open and so obviously ecofreakish. Instead, they’d be combing through bimplant ads and sites where you could shoot exotic animals online without leaving your office chair. Full Points to Adam, thought Zeb.

Could it be that Adam had designed this game himself? A game with his own name embedded as the Monitor? But he’d never shown much interest in animals, as such. Though, come to think of it, he’d been known to view with mild contempt the Rev’s interpretation of Genesis, which was that God had made the animals for the sole pleasure and use of man, and you could therefore exterminate them at whim. Was Extinctathon a piece of anti-Rev counterinsurgency on the part of Adam? Had he somehow got mixed up with the ecofreaks? Maybe he’d had a conversion moment while smoking too much of some brain-damaging hallucinogenic and bonded with a plant fairy. Though that was unlikely: it was Zeb who’d been the chemicals risk-taker, not Adam. But Adam was mixed up with someone, for sure, because he’d never be able to pull off something like this on his own.

Zeb continued along the pathway. He chose Yes to show readiness and was redirected. Welcome, Spirit Bear. Do you want to play a general game, or do you want to play a Grandmaster? The second was the choice to make, said Adam’s instructions, so Zeb clicked on it.

Good. Find your playroom. MaddAddam will meet you there.

The path to the playroom was complicated, zigzagging from one coordinate to another through pixels located here and there on innocuous sites: ads, for the most part, though some were lists: TOP TEN SCARY EASTER BUNNY PICS, TEN SCARIEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME, TEN SCARIEST SEA MONSTERS. Zeb found a portal through the buck teeth of a deranged purple plush rabbit with a terrorized infant perched on its knee, from there to a tombstone in a still from Night of the Living Dead, the original, and finally to the eye of a coelacanth. Then he was in the chatroom.

Welcome to MaddAddam’s playroom, Spirit Bear. You have a message.

Zeb clicked on Deliver message.

Hello, said the message. You see, it works. Here are the coordinates for next week’s chatroom. A.

Minimalist bugger, thought Zeb. He’s not going to tell me a thing.

He bought the suggested outfit, or most of it: the round glasses were too much to take, as were the shoes. He broke in the pants and the shirts — spilled food on them, frayed them a little, ran them through the wash a few times. Then he tossed his previous clothes into various dumpsters and wiped his biotraces off his cheesy Starburst room as much as he could.

After paying up at Starburst — no sense in having the skip-tracers on your tail, if avoidable — he made the cross-continent trek to San Francisco. Then he reported at HelthWyzer West as instructed, presented his fraudulent docs, and underwent the welcoming Hi, Buddy, Happy You’re Here, We’ll Help You Feel at Home minuet of the podge-faced greeter.

Nobody said boo. He was expected, he was accepted. Smooth as grease.

Inside HelthWyzer West he was assigned a bachelor condo unit in the residential tower. Nothing rundown about these facilities: nice landscaping around the entranceway, swimming pool on the roof, and the plumbing and electricals all worked, though the interior design was a little Spartan. There was a queen-sized bed, an optimistic signal. Bachelor did not mean celibate in the world of HelthWyzer West, it appeared.

The workspace high-rise had a cafeteria where he was issued a swipe card that would record his consumption: everyone had a points allowance, which they could use on anything on the menu. The food was real food, not spurious glop like the stuff he’d eaten at Bearlift. The drinks had alcohol in them, which was the least you could expect in a drink.

The HelthWyzer women were brisk, and had jobs to do and not much time for small talk, and — he guessed — no tolerance at all for cheap pickup lines, so he didn’t even bother; but though he’d vowed to be careful about personal involvements because of the kinds of questions they could generate, he wasn’t made of stone. Already a couple of the younger females had looked at his Seth name tag — name tags were a fashion statement at HelthWyzer — and one of them had asked him if he was new because she couldn’t recall seeing him before, but of course she was kind of new herself.

Was there a little twist of the shoulders, a giveaway flutter of the eyelids? Marjorie, he read, not lingering too long on her name tag, which was perched on a breast of no more than ordinary prominence: obvious bimplants were not common inside the HelthWyzer walls. Marjorie had a blunt-nosed, brown-eyed, acquiescent face, like a spaniel, and in ordinary circumstances he would have proceeded, but as it was he said he hoped he’d see her around. Such a hope was not the top hope on his list of hopes — that spot was reserved for not getting caught — but it was not the bottom hope either.

The job description for Seth was that of a routine low-level IT guy, dime a dozen. Data inputting, using a packet of snoreworthy but serviceable software designed to record and compare the various factoids and buckets o’data the HelthWyzer brainiacs were coming up with. Glorified digital secretary, that’s all he was supposed to be.

The duties weren’t challenging: he could do the job with two fingers of one hand in much less time than was allotted for it. The HelthWyzer project managers didn’t supervise much, they just wanted him to keep current with the inputting. Meanwhile he could ferret around in the HelthWyzer databank unimpeded. He ran a few IT security tests of his own to see whether any outside pirates were trying to hack in: if they were, it would be useful to know about it.

At first he didn’t uncover any telltale signs; but during one of his deep dives he pinpointed something that looked as if it might be a cryptic tunnel. He wiggled through it, found himself outside the HelthWyzer burning ring of firewalls, then lilypadded his way into the Extinctathon chatroom. A message was waiting for him: Use only when needed. Don’t spend long. Wipe all prints. A. He logged out quickly, then erased his trail. He’d need to build another portal, because whoever was using this tunnel might work out that someone else had been through it.

He decided Seth needed to be known as a guy who did a lot of gaming so that checking into Extinctathon wouldn’t stand out should anyone be snooping. That was the operational reason; but also he just wanted to test out the games, and to see how easy it was to fool around during work hours without being reprimanded — staff weren’t supposed to waste time in this way, or not too much time — and also how easy it was to cheat. He thought of it as keeping his hand in.

Some of the games on recreational offer were standard — weapons, explosions, and so on — but others were posted by the staff at HelthWyzer West: biogeeks were just as geeky as other geeks, so naturally they designed games of their own. Spandrel was one of the better ones: it let you devise extra, functionally useless features for a bioform, then link them to sexual selection and fast-forward to see what the evolution machine would churn out. Cats with rooster-like wattles on their foreheads, lizards with big red lipstick-kiss lips, men with enormous left eyes — whatever the females chose was favoured, and you could manipulate their bad taste in male attributes, just like real life. Then you played predators against prey. Would the supersexy spandrels impede hunting skills or slow down escape? If your guy wasn’t sexy enough, he wouldn’t get laid and you’d go extinct; if he was too sexy, he’d get eaten and you’d go extinct. Sex versus dinner: it was a fine balance. Packets of random mutations could be purchased for a small sum.

Weather Monsters wasn’t bad either: the game threw extreme weather events at your player — a puny human avatar of either gender — and you tried to see how long your player could survive them. With points won, you could purchase tools for your avatar: boots that allowed it to run faster and jump higher, lightning-proof clothing, floating planks for floods and tsunamis, wet handkerchiefs for covering its nose during brush fires, Joltbars for when it was trapped under a thick wad of snow due to an avalanche. A shovel, some matches, an axe. If your avatar survived the giant mudslide — a killer event — you’d get a whole toolbox and a thousand extra points for your next game.

The one Zeb played the most was called Intestinal Parasites — a nasty gucklunch the biogeeks thought was hilarious. The parasites were truly ugly, with rebarbed hooks all around their mouths and no eyes, and you had to nuke them with toxic pills or deploy an arsenal of nanobots or moteins before they could lay thousands of eggs in you or creep through your brain and out your tear ducts, or split themselves into regenerating segments and turn the inside of your body into a festering patty-melt. Were they real, or had the biogeeks made them up? Worse, were they gene-splicing them right now as part of a bio-weaponry project? Impossible to know.

Play Intestinal Parasites too much and you’d get nightmares, guaranteed, said the game’s running slogan. So, never one to do as he was told, Zeb did play it too much, and he did get nightmares.

Which didn’t stop him from creating an alias of the game, then reworking one of the hideous mouths so that it functioned as a gateway. He stashed his code in a triple-locked thumbdrive for safekeeping, then parked it at the back of his supervisor’s desk drawer in a nest of rubber bands, used nosewipes, and orphaned cough drops. No one would ever look there.